Commentary on: Kobe, Joshua (2010) Do People Actually Believe In Objective Moral Truths? On the Human. December 2010
Neither logical judgments nor moral judgments would have much power if they were not underwritten by feelings. The proposition “P & not-P” is not only formally wrong, but it (usually) feels wrong. Same with the proposition “lying is wrong.” If it did not feel wrong to lie (mostly, for most people, in most circumstances), we’d probably lie a good deal more (as sociopaths do) — and information conveyed through language would become a lot less reliable: Perhaps even the adaptive value of language itself — the advantages it conferred on our ancestors: the advantages that gave birth to language (hence culture) and embedded it in our genomes and hence our brains — would have been nonexistent or insufficient if telling hadn’t been coupled with a sufficiently strong propensity toward telling the truth rather than lying (as CL Dodgson‘s Tortoise tried to explain to Achilles).
So we believe certain things are true because they feel true (not just because they are true). And we believe certain things are wrong because they feel wrong. This is not unlike the reason we like sweets (evolutionary biology’s favourite example of proximal causation): not because they raise our blood-sugar and give us energy but because they taste good. And they taste good because the tendency to seek and eat sugar was adaptive for our ancestors (when sugar was still rare: unlike now, when it is available everywhere and excess causes caries and diabetes.)
And what feels right and wrong is no doubt more influenced by our experiences and culture than it is by logic, or even by empirical evidence (another taste that is partly wired-in and partly acquired).
So it is unsurprising that our moral tastes coincide more with our own culture than someone else’s. It is also unsurprising that in hypothetical or even counterfactual mode — “Imagine extraterrestrials with feelings and practises very different from our own…” — we make different “moral judgments” on others’ behalf. It’s rather like asking “If candy tasted bitter rather than sweet, would one feel like eating it?” The prevailing feeling in such hypotheticals is the more abstract one, of formal logical consistency with the premises rather than about what you yourself find tasty.
One might have added (hypothetically) that in a hypothetical, insentient-zombie world, anything goes, morally speaking: nothing feels (hence is) wrong or right, since nothing feels like anything at all. (But universal sociopathy does not seem to be an evolutionarily stable strategy in the real world, even if behavioural propensities replace feelings.)
So much for “objective moral truths.” The rest is just about either (1) practical rules for people to agree to abide by and enforce compliance with or (2) ways to influence or manipulate people’s feelings about what’s right and wrong.
Carroll, L. (1895) What the Tortoise said to Achilles Mind 4(14): 278-280
Harnad, S, (2010) From Sensorimotor Categories and Pantomime to Grounded Symbols and Propositions. In: Handbook of Language Evolution, Oxford University Press.
________ & Scherzer, P. (2008) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89
Footnote: I am a vegan, and the image of the mutilated rabbit, which I display very reluctantly, is in no way intended to be facetious or flippant: It’s dead serious.